is ten, fifteen, or twenty thousand annually, and thus is knowledge disseminated throughout the world, enabling the men who furnish me with facts to reap a rich harvest of never dying fame.  Grant them a copyright to the new ideas they may supply to the world, and at once you put a stop to the production of such books as mine, to my great injury and to the loss of mankind at large.  Facts and ideas are common property, and their owners, the public, have a right to use them as they will.”

The historian would say:  “Mr. Senator, if you persist in this course, you will never again see histories like mine.  Here are hundreds of people scattered over the country, industriously engaged in disinterring facts relating to our early history.  They are enthusiasts, and many of them are very poor.  Some of them contrive to publish, in the form of books, the results of their researches, while others give them to the newspapers, or to the historical societies, and thus they are enabled to come before the world.  Few people buy such things, and it not unfrequently happens that men who have spent their lives in the collection of important facts, waste much of their small means in giving them to an ungrateful nation.  Nevertheless, they have their reward in the consciousness that they are thus enabling others to furnish the world with accurate histories of their country.  I find them of infinite use.  They are my hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they never look for payment for their labor.  Deprive me of their services, and I shall be obliged to abandon the production of books, and return to the labors of my profession—­and they will be deprived of fame, while the public will be deprived of knowledge.”

The medical writer would say:  “Mr. Senator, should you succeed in carrying out the idea with which you have commenced, you will, I fear, be the cause of great injury to our profession, and probably of great loss of life, for you will thereby arrest the dissemination of knowledge.  We have, here and abroad, thousands of industrious and thoughtful men, more intent upon doing good than upon pecuniary profit, who give themselves to the study of particular diseases, furnishing the results to our journals, and not unfrequently publishing monographs of the highest value.  The sale of these is always small, and their publication not unfrequently makes heavy drafts on the small means of their authors.  Such men are of infinite use to me, for it is by aid of their most valuable labors that I have found myself enabled to prepare the numerous and popular works that I have given to the world.  Look at them.  There are several volumes of each, of which I sell thousands annually, to my great profit.  Deprive me of the power to avail myself of the brains of the working men of the profession and my books will soon cease to be of any value, and I shall lose the large income now realized from them, while the public will suffer in their health by reason of the increased difficulty of disseminating information.”